Just Words - a Sceptic's Guide to jargon

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Just Words? How language gets in the way

Ronald G Young MA MSc

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years

.Trying to use words, and every attempt

is a new start, a and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

with shabby equipment always deteriorating

in the general mass of imprecision of feeling

East Coker; Four Quartets

TS Eliot

CONTENTS

1. Purpose

2. The search for the heart of the onion

3. New words and phrases can cause amnesia!

4. Critiquing the professionals..

5. Glossary6. Some nominations

7. Floating in words and metaphors8. The role of international agencies in creating La Pensee Unique

9. The importance of satire

10. The way forward

11. Further Reading

12. no Comment


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1. PurposeHistory is assumed to consist of hard events like wars and revolts. But such events dont just happen

they are caused by what goes on inside out minds not just feelings of ambition; fear; greed;

resentment; but the stories (theories) we use to make sense of events. And they are legitimised by the

words we use. Words are very powerful - indeed have a life of their own some more so than others.

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit ourpurpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of

critical thinking.

One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwells Politics and the English language

http://mla.stanford.edu/Politics_&_English_language.pdf Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain

clichs and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking for example how the use of the passive tense

undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough

definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book

The Devils Dictionary http://www.rosenoire.org/archives/Bierce,_Ambrose_-

_The_Devil's_Dictionary.pdfwhose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined

as a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket. A robust

scepticism about both business and politics infused his work bit it did not amount to a coherentstatement about power.

This glossary looks at more than 100 words and phrases which occur frequently in the discourse of

government, consultancy and big business which have this effect and offers some definitions which at

least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary if not actually taking political actions.

Only in the latter stages of its drafting was I reminded of John SaulsA Doubters Companion a

dictionary of aggressive common sense1issued in 1994 which talks of the humanist tradition of using

alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon

against ide recues and the pretensions of power. Saul contrasts this approach with that of the

rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control

communications.

This glossary of mine is written explicitly in the humanist tradition of struggle against power and the

glossary therefore forms part of a wider commentary on the effort various writers have made over the

ages to challenge the pretensions of the powerful (and of the thought police who have operated on

their behalf). And , of course, the role of satire2, caricature and cartoons

3, poetry

4and painting

5should

not be forgotten! The role of films and TV series these days should also not be under-estimated6.

2. The search for the heart of the onionI have been dabbling in power (and words) now for almost 50 years inspired by the writings of such

varied figures as Tony Crosland, RH Tawney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Tawneyand EP

Thompson (eg Out of Apathy) to select politics and economics as my university subjects in 1962

Coincidentally the year that Bernard Cricks importantIn Defence of Politicsfirst appeared; then

spending the period between 1968 and 1991 as first a local then powerful regional politician in

Scotland; and the last 20 years advising government units in 8 central European and central Asian

countries.

1Some examples of what I might call his definitional text can be found at

http://everything2.com/title/The+Doubter%2527s+Companion and an interview with him at

http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html2not just the literary sort - see section 93from Daumier to Feiffer and Steadman4

Brecht5Goya, Kollwitz and Grosz are the most powerful example6From the Yes, Minister series in the UK in the 1970s to the The Thick of it of the 2000s


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The social sciences were just beginning to flex their muscles in my student days and popular

management texts also beginning to appear (we forget that Peter Drucker invented the genre only in

the late 1950s). Books such as Marris and ReinsDilemmas of Social Reform (1968); Donald Schoens

Beyond the Stable State(1971); and Heclo and Wildavskys The Private Government of Public Money

(1974) impressed me enormously not only for their application of social science to topics such as the

fight against poverty; organisational structures and budgeting (respectively) but also for the clarity of

their language. And the combination, between 1968 and 1985 of academic and political work gave me

both the incentive and opportunity to explore what light that burgeoning academic literature could

throw on the scope for government actions (and structures) for social improvement. Not least of my

puzzlements was about the source and nature of power. And the story told by one of the architects of

the British NHS (Aneurin Bevan) about his own search for power - from his own municipality through

trade unions to the heights of the British Cabinet - used the powerful metaphor of the onion. As each

layer peeled away, there did not appear to be a heart!

I always knew that the best way to understand a subject was to write about it. And therefore developed

the habit of writing papers to help me as much as others make sense of the various path-breaking

initiatives in which I was involved particularly trying to make government more inclusive both in

its style and policy impact. The audience for such writing was practitioners rather than academics and also, with my first little book The Search for Democracy (1976), community activists who needed

some help in confronting the more sophisticated bureaucracy (and words) with which they were

confronted after a major reorganisation. So the language had to be clear but not superficial. This

explains any idiosyncrasies in the voice I have developed.

And writing that first book made me aware about the varying motivations there are in writing books

(eg pass examinations; make a reputation or money; advancing a new tendentious theory) and how few

books seemed to be written to help the average person understand a subject or question. The Readers

and Writers Cooperative which started in the early 1970s (now the highly successful For Beginners

series) offers a comic-book approach. And how helpful the Dummies Guide series are! Even Rough

Guides has muscled in on this approach.

This particular effort started, I suppose, way back in 1999 when I selected about 40 words for aglossary which accompanied a little book I wrote then (In Transit notes on good governance) which

tried to capture my understanding of what was then the fast-moving field of public administration. My

definitions were jazzed up in order to provoke thought - eg performance measurement; judging an

organisation by measuring what it produces, rather than whom it keeps happy or employed. Most

usefully done on a comparative basis - over time: or among units performing similar work.

In 2008, the glossary I left behind in a major report - Learning from experience; some reflections on

how training can help develop administrative capacity- was more outrageous.

- http://www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform/key%20papers/Discusion_Angl_last_last.pdf

But it has taken me some years to realise a more serious version could be a powerful tool for

challenging the grip which neo-liberalism has on our minds!! Attempting this longer definition of key

terms has been an excellent discipline.


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3. New words and phrases can cause amnesia!We should be on our alert whenever we spot a new phrase entering government discourse. New words

and phrases put a particular spin on an issue and often carry the hidden implication that a new problem

has just arisen.. At first I was amused at the way, for example, the vocabulary for poverty changed

over time inequality, disadvantage, deprivation, social malaise, marginalisation, social exclusion,

social injustice etc. Jules Feiffer had a nice cartoon about it in which he has a poor kid repeat thevarious words which had been used to describe his condition and then said ruefully, at least my

vocabulary is improving!

But I now realise that three powerful forces propelled these verbal gymnastics first the need of

governments to avoid admission of failure better to imply a new condition had arisen! But the new

vocabulary kills institutional memory and prevents us from exporing why previous solutions have

failed

Professional interests tend also to arise around each new definition and create a second, powerful

interest favouring new vocabulary. Mystification is one of several methods used by professionals to

protect their power and income.

And the last decade or so has seen a third reason for us to pay more attention to the language we use -

governments have fallen even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests7and apowerful new verbal smokescreen has arisen to try to conceal this. Evidence-based policy-making is

typical first the arrogant implication that no policy-making until that point had been based on

evidence; and the invented phrase concealing the fact that policy is increasingly being crafted without

evidence in order to meet corporate interests! There is no better lie than a big one!

4. Critiquing the professionals..

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are

more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who

believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defuncteconomist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic

scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with

the gradual encroachment of ideas.

JM Keynes (General Theory 1935) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

In the 1970s, a South American priest Ivan Illich attacked professionals and to the mystification of

their processes and language - with his various books which eloquently argued against the damage

done to learning by formal schooling methods (Deschooling Society); and to health by doctors and

hospitals (Medical Nemesis).

Stanislaw Andreski was one of the few academics who dared attack the pretensions of the social

sciences in his Social Sciences as Sorcery(1973 - now out of print). The importance of demystifyingcomplex language was continued by C Wright Mills in the 1950s and 1960s who once famously

summarised a 250 pages book written in tortuous syntax by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 12

pages!

Alaister Mant extended the attack to contemporary leadership (Leaders we Deserve 1983 also out of

print) puncturing somewhat the mythology about business leaders which was being spread in the

popular management books which were beginning to sell like hot potatoes. Henry Mintzberg a

Canadian management academic is about the only one who has written simply about what managers

actually do (and attacked MBAs) and, in so doing, has stripped management literature of most of its

pretensions.

7See section 6


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By reducing management exhortations to 99 self-contradictory proverbs HoodsAdministrative

Argument(1991 and also, mysteriously, out of print) showed us how shallow management ideologies

are.

In 1992 John Ralston Saul gave us a powerful but idiosyncratic critique of technical expertise in

Voltaires Bastards the dictatorship of reason in the west.

By showing the parallels with religious doctrine, Susan George did the same for the economic belief

systems which sustained the World Bank (Faith and Credit the World Banks secular empire(1994).

It was easier for people like Huycinski to take the scalpel to management gurus inManagement Gurus

what makes them and how to become one(1993) since they are only peripherally of academia.

And a once worthy venture the European Union has, sadly, developed such powerful interests of

its own that it too is part of this significant obfuscation with its use of such phrases as subsidiarity.

This text is still a draft suggestions on both definitions and words to include would be much

appreciated

Ronald G Young; Carpathian mountains

January 2011

5. GLOSSARY

I dont know what you mean by glory, Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. Of course you donttill I tell you. I meant theres a nice knock-

down argument for you!

But glory doesnt mean a nice knock-down argument, Alice objected.

WhenIuse a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to

meanneither more nor less.

The question is, said Alice, whether you canmake words mean so many different things.

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master thats all.

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. Theyve atemper, some of themparticulaly verbs, theyre the proudestadjectives you can do anything with, but not

verbshowever,Ican manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! Thats whatIsay!

Accountability; the requirement that those in power explain in a transparent, regular, structured and

truthful way what actions they have authorised and why. The corollary is that any failure of their

explanations to satisfy will lead to sanctions including dismissal. See also Open Government

Adversarial systems; the more political parties have in common (UK and US) the more they pretend

to be poles apart and fight an aggressive, winner-take-all, no-holds-barred contest which leaves no

room for civilised discourse; nor policy consensus. Bad policy-making is normally the result (see book

references at end of Annex)

Agent; an intermediary who performs actions on behalf of another. A huge theoretical literature was

built around this concept in the 1980s to try to demonstrate the way in which public servants

developed interests separate from that of the public and to justify privatisation and the separation ofpublic budget-holders from those who supplied public services. Pity that there are so few of these


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academics now bothering to develop a literature about the (actual rather than theoretical) self-serving

and downright immoral behaviour of many of those who now own and manage the privatised bodies

and arms length agencies!

Agencies; pretend companies with Chief Executives and others with hugely inflated salaries and

pension rights.

Agnostic; someone who doubts

Ambition; Our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besottedeffrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the

back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our

perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies,

we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to

speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer worldthe world that cannot beambition would be an

absolute disqualification for political authority (David Hart).

Assumptions; the things other people make which cause problems. Parsed I think; you assume;

(s)he fucks up. Project management techniques do require us to list assumptions and identify andmanage risks but in the field of technical Assistance these are just boxes to tick. In any project, the

best approach is to list the worst things which could happen, assume they will occur and plan how to

minimise their frequency and effects.

Audit; something both overdone and underdone overdone in volume and underdone in results. A

process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (Enron; global banking

scandals have demonstrated). See also Law

Benchmark; a technical-sounding term which gives ones discourse a scientific aura.

Bottleneck; what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance always located at the

top!

Bureaucracy: literally rule by the office (and the strictly defined powers which surround it as

distinct from rule by whim). See rule of law. The adjective (bureaucratic) has now become a term of

abuse.

Capacity; something which other people lack

Capacity development; something which consultants recommend and which generally boils down to

some training programmes. In fact capacity is developed by a combination of practice and positive

feedback.

Change; something which was difficult to start in public organisations in the 1970s and is now

difficult to stop.

Change agent; in the beginning a brave person now a spiv.

Citizen; a displaced person in the modern polis replaced by the customer who has to have money

and spend it before any rights can be exercised. For an excellent article which explores the

significance and implocations of the various terms and roles see -http://www.bdp.org.ar/facultad/catedras/cp/tecadm/Mintzberg%20gerenciando.pdf

Civil servant; someone who used to be able to stand up to Ministers.

Client; someone receiving a (complex) service from a professional usually with the protection of a

professional code.


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Coalition; a government composed of political parties which have normally fought one another in an

election; which have not gained sufficient seats to form a majority government; and which cooperate

with other parties to avoid facing the electorate again. Seen by some as highly civilised (encouraging

consensual qualities) and by other as highly undemocratic (smoke-filled rooms)

Collateral damage; accidental shootings of innocent citizens.

Commodification; to put a market value on services which were previously offered voluntarily and

offering them for sale on the market in order to make a profit.

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong parsed I communicate;

you misunderstand; he/they dont listen.

Compliance; consistency with a defined outcome. Traditionally called obedience.

Consultant; a con-man who operates like a sultan! An outsider who knows almost nothing about an

organisation who is brought in to give the air of objectivity to outrageous changes the bosses havealready agreed amongst themselves.

Consultation; the skill of bouncing other people to agree with what you have already decided.

Contract out; as in put out a contract out on to wipe out.

Control; to ensure that people do what the elites want. This used to be done by fear but a range of

clever carrots and sticks are now used as well as words and language itself. Control used to be ex-

ante (detailed instructions before the event) but is increasingly ex-post through audit, monitoring

and evaluation.

Coordination; the lack of which is the most annoying thing for the rationalist in organisations

Corruption; a fashionable thing to be against. A new anti-corruption industry of consultants has

arisen which reformulates the public administration principles to which NPM (see below) is opposed,

thereby generating maximum confusion. See also integrity

Customer; the person who has supplanted the citizen and is responsible for environmental destruction

et al

Decentralisation; creating local people who can be made scapegoats for deterioration in service.

Deliberative democracy; In contrast to the traditional theory of democracy, in which voting is

central, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can arise only throughpublic deliberation generally through the presentation of evidence and then dissection of this in

discussion see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy

Democracy; a system which allows citizens to select, at periodical intervals, from a small group of

self-selected and perpetuating elites

Development; a good thing.

environment; whats around me which I can use and abuse for my benefit.

Effectiveness; the quality of combining resources in a harmonious way to achieve specified objectives

Efficiency; a positive ratio between output and input


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Empower; a classic word of the new century which suggests that power can be benignly given when

in reality it has to be taken.

Evaluation; the process of finding out who is to blame. The EU has a very traditional model of

evaluation carried out by outside experts which takes so long (and is so long and tortuous in

language) that its results cannot be used in the design of new programmes. See learning organisation

below.

Evidence-based policy-making; a phrase which represents the hubristic peak of the generation of UK

social scientism which captured the UK civil service in the late 1990s at the time its political masters

succumbed to corporate interests and therefore were practising less rather than more evidence-based

policy-making!

Evaluation; job-creation for surplus academics. An important part of the policy-making process

which has been debased by it being sub-contracted to a huge industry of consultants who produce

large reports which are never read by policy-makers.

Focus group; a supposedly representative group of voters who will give us a clue about what we

should be doing.

Governance; an academic term to describe the obvious namely that governments lacked the power to

do things on their own and required to work in partnership with private and others. Found useful by the

World Bank which is not allowed to engage in political activity to conceal the fact that they were

engaged on a highly ideological mission to privatise the world and to hollow-out government.

http://classwebs.spea.indiana.edu/kenricha/Oxford/Archives/Oxford%202006/Courses/Governance/Ar

ticles/Stoker%20-%20Governance.pdf

Good governance; a package of ideal practices of liberal-democratic government which

international organisations drew up in the 1990s and stupidly imagined could be developed by acombination of moral and financial exhortations by autocracies and kleptocracies. It forms the basis of

the UNDP Millennium Goals. A few voices of common sense have suggested a more appropriate

strategy would be that of good-enough governance (http://relooney.fatcow.com/00_New_1805.pdf)

Greed; something which is killing humanity and the planet and is epitomised by ownership of an

aggressive SUV; its assumed that increasing petrol prices will drive these monsters off our street but

a touch of ridicule would also help!

Groupthink; blinkered thinking which overcomes the leadership of an organisation when its culture has

become too arrogant, centralised and incestuous: and when it is too protected from critical messages

from and about the external world

Holistic; a magical quality - creating harmony which some people imagine can be created in

government by appropriate mechanisms of coordination. Others argue that the job will be done

naturally by a mixture of decentralisation and the market.

Hubris; something which politicians and policy experts suffer from ie a belief that their latest

wheeze will solve problems which have eluded the combined skills and insights of their predecessors

Human Resource management(HRM); treating staff and workers like dirt

Humility; something which politicians and policy experts have too little of

Impact; the measured effect of an activity on identified groups.


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Impact assessment; the proper (a) identification of the groups which will be affected by a policy

change and (b) measurement of the economic impact of the change on those groups. Clearly, very

demanding! See systems approach

Implementation; the act of trying to bring an intended state of affairs to fruition. The word used in the

Slavic language perhaps is more powerful execution! In the 1970s political science developed an

important body of literature which showed the various ways in which the good intentions of laws were

undermined. The classic book by Wildavsky and Pressman had the marvellous sub-title How Great

Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; Or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs

Work at All.

Input; the resources which are put into an activity

Integrity; something which NPM has cleaned out from public life. The strategy that came after anti-

corruption when we needed to hide the fact that corruption was actually increasing.

Joined-up government; New Labours euphemism for Stalinism.

Law; the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break

through and escape. Solon

Leader; the head of an organisation or movement whose attributed qualities seem to range from the

saintly to the diabolical. Modern leaders are supposed to exercise moral authority rather than the

exercise or threat of force but few understand what this even means.

Learning organisation; something foreign to the EU since its understanding of organisations is

trapped in the Weberian model. The last 15 years has seen management theory develop a view that the

best way for organisations to keep up with social change is through valuing their own staff by

delegation and strong ongoing feedback not by commissioning external experts to conduct complex

and irrelevant evaluations.

Legislators; the most despised group in any society (see parliamentary power).

Lobbyists; people who make the laws

Logframe; the bible for the Technical Assistance world which - with a list of activities, assumptions,

objectives, outputs and risks - conquers the complexity and uncertainty of the world and removes the

bother of creativity. For a critique see Lucy Earles 2003 paper on my website -

http://publicadminreform.webs.com/key%20papers/Lost%20in%20the%20matrix%20-

%20Earle%20and%20logframe.pdf

Manage; to make a mess of.

Market; a place or system governed by rules which sets prices through the interaction of buyers and

sellers. Under severely restrictive assumptions it can produce what economists call optimum results.

The most important of these assumptions are scale (large numbers of sellers; perfect information;

and absence of social costs). In the real world, few of these conditions exist. See also quasi-market

Minister; etymologically one who acts on the authority of another ie the ruler. In some countries

they last some time (longer often than many civil servants); in others (eg UK) they last barely a year!

Mentor; someone whose experience has given them a high reputation whose advice can be used to

guide others. Sometime adopted as a formal role in organisations.

Modernise; to restructure something which just required some oiling of the wheels.


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Monitor; a school prefect.

Neo-liberalism; one of the deadliest ideologies some costs

New public management(NPM); the body of literature which has in the past 20 years replaced that

of old public administration. It has borrowed its concepts entirely from private sector management and

has encouraged governments throughout the world -

to see the citizen as a consumer of services to reduce civil service skills to drafting of contracts; definition of service targets; and

regulation for services which are managed at arms-length by the private sector, other state

bodies or NGOs

to set up reward systems and penalties to ensure targets are metIt slowly dawned even on the NPM zealots that such an approach is positively Soviet in its inflexible

emphasis on targets and that the reward systems undermine the teamwork and policy coordination

which good policies require. There is now a backlash to NPM

OECD: the club of the rich nations - an apparently neutral body which was in fact one of the most

important proselytisers of NPM

Open government; an apparent contradiction in terms governing classically involves haggling,

compromising, striking deals which will never look good in the cold light of public scrutiny. And even

the publication of raw data can prove embarrassing to governments. But Freedom of Information Acts

are being passed throughout the world initially reactive rather than proactive and generally

protective of sensitive information. Just a pity that this coincides with the run-down of investigative

journalism - although a combination of citizen activists with new technology could ultimately prove a

powerful combination. http://www.foia.blogspot.com/

Outcome; the wider societal impact which a policy seems to have.

Output; the immediate way in which the faithful implementation of a policy can be measuredg.

Parliamentary power; when exercised negatively (in the critique and adjustment of incoherent

government proposals), something to value very highly. When exercised positively (as legislative

initiatives) something to treat as pork-trough or barrel politics.

Performance management; the system which sets targets and rewards and penalises accordingly.

Performance-orientation; a concern for the results of inputs and spending generally in improved

customer satisfaction.

Policy; a statement of the tools and resources which government is using to try to achieve an intended

set of objectives.

Policy review; the critical assessment of the outcomes and outputs of a policy field. This can be

carried out within government or by academic bodies and think-tanks and commissioned by various

bodies including government.

Political party; the last bastion of scoundrels

Politician; someone elected by voters who is, in theory, accountable to them but in fact does what his

party and its leadership tells him since this is the only way to survive let alone climb the greasy poleto advancement. Rebels become mavericks.


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Politics, A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for

private advantage (Bierce Devils Dictionary)

Populism; movements which take democracy too far.

Post-modern; distrust of explanations. The refusal to describe humanitys progress as a rational

process whose principles can be mastered as though historical progress were one more step on the

way to heaven (from intro to Postmodern Public Administrationby HD Millar and C Fox)

Priorities; Gouverner, as the French say cest choisir. State bodies and services can never do

equal justice to all the laws they are required to implement. Many new member states continue to

churn out strategic documents which are checklists of good intentions which brings the law into

disrepute.

Progress; cars travelling slower in cities than 100 years ago;

Project management; a nice idea! The religion of the new generation which operates from hand to

mouth on external funding. See also assumptions and logframe.

Public administration; a phrase which reminds us that state bodies serve the public not the state!!!

Public management; something more clever than public administration which therefore warrants

higher rewards and excuses shady behaviour.

Quality management; a fashionable term of the 1990s of which we now hear little.

Quasi-market; a pretend market. In the misguided attempt to introduce business systems into public

services, governments have tried to get everyone to compete against one another. Naturally this

requires a lot of paperwork and bureaucrats (disguised under the term transaction costs) which is,

curiously, what the reforms were supposed to get away from! See also side-effects.

Rationality; how many people remember the incredible debate in academic circles in the 1960s and

1970s about rationality, bureaucracy and politics and whether it was ever possible to have significant

policy changes as distinct from incremental fudge (disjointed incrementalism as Lindblom called

it)? Now we seem to have the opposite problem. Sadly, few academics seem to be discussing it.

Reengineer; to take apart and build in a different way. A new term in the public sector for an interest

that goes back to the zero-budgeting of the 1960s. Why is it I always think of Stalins epithet for

Soviet writers Engineers of the human soul when I hear the re-engineering word?

Reform; to divert attention from core questions by altering organisational boundaries and

responsibilities

Regulation; as natural monopolies have been privatised, a vast system of public regulation has been

set up to control the obvious consequences of private monopolies. See also regulatory reform

Regulatory reform; reforming regulations that raise unnecessary obstacles to competition,

innovation and growth, while ensuring that regulations efficiently serve important social objectives

(OECD)

Rule of law; the principle that no-one is above the law. See also Law.

Sceptic; an aggressive agnostic a quality which is greatly missed these days


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Scrutiny; a political form of audit which became popular in the UK recently to give local politicians

something to do after local government had been stripped of most of its functions.

Services; what the outputs of government activities should give us but rarely does.

Side-effects; unanticipated and negative impacts of policy interventions generally more powerful

than the positive. Can lead to a fatalistic view of policy-making (see Hood)

Social capital; a term brought into the currency of think-tanks and government by the combined

efforts of Robert Putnam and the World Bank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital. Most of us

understand it by the simpler trust trust.

Society; what used to bear the responsibility for public services and is now being asked again to take

them over (see Big Society)

State; a bad thing at least for worshippers of NPM

Strategy; a statement of how an organisation understands the environment in which it is working;what problems or opportunities it sees as priority to deal with and how it proposes to do that.

Strategic; what I consider important

Strategic management; a proactive style of management

street-level officials; a term used to describe those officials who are in close contact with the members

of the public and have to exercise discretion and judgement in their behaviour (field; front-line). Its

positive sense is that they often have a better sense of what the public needs than senior management.

Its negative sense is that, distant from control, such officials can more easily engage in self-serving

behaviour.

Subsidiarity; a term used by the Catholic hierarchy which is now part of EU rhetoric can be used to

legitimise the further stripping of state functions. Its origin lies apparently in Thomas Aquinas and the

justification for government action only where private initiative is insufficient or lacking.

Sustainable; a word which, be being placed in front of development, has lost its meaning

Systems approach; an approach to management which appreciates the complexity of the

environments in which interventions take place and invites teams to invent their own solutions based

on a systematic definition of the problem facing the customer.

http://www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk/index.php?pg=18&backto=1&utwkstoryid=257

Targets; what those in power use to measure the performance of and to blame others

Teamwork;a word to beware! Generally used by those in power to get their way while seeming

democratic. While true that decisions taken as a result of joint discussion can be often better (and more

robust) than those imposed, a lot depends on the manner in which the discussion is held - whether it is

structured in a way designed to elicit problems and ideas or, rather, to sanction a dominant view (see

groupthink). See Belbin for details of teams roles and structures

Think-tank; the shock-troops of neo-liberalism. Apparently neutral bodies (funded, however, by big

business) which marketed the products for the transformation of the rational-legal state into a state of

neo-liberal governance.

Tools of government; the various ways government tries to make you do what they think is good for

you. Laws do not implement themselves. Their implementation requires a commitment to change


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which cannot be taken for granted in societies whose populations are struggling to survive and whose

new rulers many uncertain of how long they will survive in office are subject to temptations of

short-term personal gains. In such contexts, is it realistic to expect policy-makers and civil servants to

have an overriding concern for future public benefit? To explore that question requires us to look at

the wider issue of motivation. The table sets out seven different motivations which can be found in

people and some of the policy tools which would be relevant for such motivations. Legalism, for

example, assumes that people know about laws and will obey them regardless of the pull of extended

family ties (eg for recruitment). Training and functional review assumes that people simply need to

understand in order to take the relevant action. Other tools assume that man is basically a calculating

machine. And so on.In 2008 the British National Audit Office commissioned a study on sanctions

and rewards in the public sector the only such government review I know -

http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0708/sanctions_and_rewards.aspx. However, as Colin Talbot

points out in his new book on theories of Performance, the assessment is based on discredited

rationalistic theory of behaviour

Motives and tools in the change process

Motivating Factor Example of tool Particular mechanism

1. Understanding TrainingCampaigns

Counting and comparing league

tables

Rational persuasionAppeal to common sense

Questioning when ones body

compares badly

2. Commitment Leadership

Consultation and cooperation

Training

Legitimisation; inspiration

Shared vision

Pride (in behaving

professionally)

3. Personal Benefit Pay increase and bonus

Promotion (including political

office)

Good publicity

Winning an award

Monetary calculation

ambition

Reputation;

Psychological Status

4. Personal Cost Named as poor performer

DemotionReport cards

Psychological (Shame)

Monetarypride

5. Obligation Law

Action plan

Family ties

Courts

Managerial authority

Social pressure

6. Peer influence Peer review

Bribery

Quality circles

Pressure from colleagues

7. Social influence Opinion surveys Feedback from public about

service quality

Source; an earlier version of this originally appeared in Young (EU Tacis 2005)

Governments trying to improve the performance of state bodies have also made increasing use of

league tables. This involves audit bodies, for example, collecting and publishing comparative

information about the performance of individual schools and hospitals in an attempt to persuade

senior managers to address the problems of poor performance (1.3 in table). This can also act as a

market-type force - bringing the force of public opinion against the organisation (4.3 in table).

Training; surgery of the mind. A marvellous phrase an old political colleague of mine used to

describe the mind-bending and propaganda which goes on in a lot of workshops.

Transparency; an EU buzz-word meaning exposing the outside world to the tortuous procedures

and language of the European Commission. The reaction to the coverage which Wikileaks gave to the

leaked US Embassy cables shows how skindeep is the commitment to transparency.


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Trust; something which economists and their models dont have and which, therefore, is assumed by

them not to exist within organisations. As economic thinking has invaded public organisations,

everyone has been assumed to be a rent-seeker and a huge (and self-fulfilling) edifice of checks

and controls have been erected

Whistle-blower; someone without authority who blows a whistle and brings everyone down on

them for the chaos they cause.

InvitationFeedback on definitions would be much appreciated as well as further reading and references


15/23


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I used the epithet realistic above in order to distinguish the older studies which painted a rather ideal

picture of the formalities of the system (what the 19thcentury Walter Bagehot called the

dignifiedparts) from the more rounded studies of the hidden(Bagehot), informal processes which

were encouraged by the seminal 1970s book about the British budget process The Private

government of public moneyby the outsiders Heclo and Wildavsky.

6.3 Why so few nominations from universitiesA Critical study or analysis is a more complex term since the word can mean carpingto the man

in the street or textual deconstruction to an academic. When I use the phrase critical study (as Humpty

Dumpty might have said) I mean one which tries not only to describe a system but to assess how well

it works (begging the obvious question Of whom?!)

Despite the knowledge which academics in political science, sociology or public management can

bring to the subject, several major factors seem to conspire to prevent social scientists from making

any critical contribution to our understanding of the health of the governance system. First is the

strength of academic specialisation - which has discouraged and continues to discourage the sort of

inter-disciplinary approach needed to explore the question of the capacity of a governance system.

http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS/Open%20the%20Social%20Sciences.pdf

Then there is the aloofness of the academic tradition which makes it difficult for specialists to engage

in critiques which might be seen as too political. Not, however, that this prevented people like Peter

Self from lambasting the nonsenses of market thinking in government in the 1980s. And a recent

Conference of American Political Scientists took some time out to confront some home-truths -

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/07/polisciStoker said it was important for the discipline to grapple with the criticism that it has become irrelevant, but he

also said that there were "tricky issues" that made it difficult for scholars to become more relevant without

sacrificing key values.

"Truth and evidence and reasoning are not in the forefront of political decision making," he said, and yet

political scientists revere those things. In the political sphere, "we are competing with ideology, pragmatism,

interests," he said. Further, the policy world operates in "a very time-specific" way with "a window of

opportunity" in which to influence key people. The traditional time frames for scholarly publishing, he said,

simply don't work when it comes to policy. Many scholars produce great work "two years late," he said.And Stoker also said that the discipline doesn't reward relevance. A young scholar is more likely to be promoted

for "the novelty of methodological contribution" than for "research that actually has an impact."

"If you want to be relevant as a discipline," he said, "you have to recruit people who want to be relevant." And in

this respect, he said, American political science departments are not doing well. He described his experiences

teaching at Harvard University, where he was tremendously impressed with the 20 seniors in his seminar on

comparative politics. One day he asked how many were planning to go to graduate school in political science

and was "stunned" to find out that the students -- many of them idealistic about changing the world -- had to a

person ruled that out in favor of law school. Their view was that "to be relevant, you have to have a law degree."

In Sweden, Rothstein said, this would be viewed as a terrible thing. "No such persons" like those Harvard

seniors he taught "would dream of going to law school," which they would see as "boring and technical." But

while American universities tell those who want to change the world to go to law school, they attract other kinds

of students to grad school. "I was not at all impressed by the graduate students" at Harvard, he said. "They

wanted to stay away from anything relevant."Political scientists are too focused on developing theories about government, ignoring the huge impact -- a life-

and-death impact, he noted -- that government has. Tens of thousands of people die each year because they can't

get safe water or health care from corrupt governments, but political scientists prefer to theorize about the

governments rather than thinking about how to change them with the goal of getting them to provide their people

with water and health care.

As an example, Rothstein cited a session he attended on "clientelism"in Africa, a form of corruption that is

widespread and damaging. Rothstein said he asked the presenters about comparisons to countries that have

moved past clientelism, and that they had no answers. "The discipline is organized" such that African area

studies scholars will simply compare various forms of the practice and "never ask how you can get out of

clientelism," since that would require looking outside their region and focusing on solutions, he said.

"The discipline is organized to avoid interesting comparisons of issues," rather than "on actual people." If a

dominant factor in thinking about clientelism was wanting to get rid of it, research projects wouldn't just

compare the strategies by which clientelism-dominated countries function, he said.


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Colin LeysMarket-driven Politicsand Alysson PollokNHS PLC(2004) are powerful critiques of the

effect of commodofication on some public services

http://books.google.com/books?id=_VMM8g0CcdEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_s

ummary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false(2003). And I have already mentioned Colin Hay and

Gerald Stoker. Rod Rhodes is a more typical example

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pv7z35s;jsessionid=A8F58303AC474E1672E0C9B262BCA0B0#pag

e-3 a leading public administration academic who invented the phrase hollowed-out executive to

describe the loss of government functions in the last 30 years - but who chose to keep his critique

incestuous both in the language and outlets he used. He played a major role in developing the

network understanding of government but then allowed anthropological and phenomenological

assumptions to overwhelm him.

The blandishments of consultancy are a potential counter pressure to this tradition which gets a small

minority of academics too engaged with peripheral issues which so excite civil servants and Ministers.

A final factor explaining the lack of academic contribution to the understanding of the nature of our

current democratic system is the contempt in which academics who write for (and become popular

with) the wider public are held in the academic community - and the damage which is therefore done

to ones academic career if one chooses that path. I remember how the charismatic historian AJPTayor was treated. And its interesting that Zygmunt Baumann, for example, began to write his books

only after he retired. Major developments in public management have, of course, encouraged

academics like Norman Flynn to present and assess them for a wider public

http://books.google.com/books?id=Bp5DMkb3ijEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_su

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

And the same has happened in the field of constitional theory eg Anthony Kings The British

Constition

http://books.google.com/books?id=HEC6Ivq2JK8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_su

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false2007). But the first is a bit long on descriptions and the

second on historical figures. And both are very partial pictures of the governance system.

Consistent with the post-modernist mood, Gerry Stoker places the problem firmly within our own

minds -propensity to disappoint is inherent feature of governance even in democratic societies. I think that a

substantial part of the discontent with politics is because the discourse and practice of collective

decision-making sits very uncomfortably alongside the discourse and practice of individual choice,

self-expression and market-based fulfilment of needs and wants. As a result too many citizens fail

appreciate these inherent characteristics of the political process in democratic settings.

Making decisions through markets relies on individuals choosing what suits them. The political

processes that are essential to steer government struggle to deliver against the lionization of

individual choice in our societies. Democracy means that you can be involved in the decision but what

the decision is not necessarily your choice yet you are expected to accept the decision. As a form of

collective decision-making politics is, even in a democracy, a centralized form of decision-makingcompared to market-based alternatives.

6.4 What journalists have offeredSome Journalists have made an honourable effort over the decades to give the wider public some

critical overviews starting with Anthony Sampson who famously tried to track the operations of the

system over 4 decades finishing his last, angriest version only months before his death in 2004.

Andrew Marr had a book in the mid 1990s on the failure and future of British democracy. So did

Simon Jenkins (Accountable to None 1996). But it was a campaigning (rather than mainstream)

journalist who produced in 2001 the most revealing and critical study Captive State - the corporate

takeover of Britain which gave us the real detail, for example, behind Gordon Browns horrendous

Private Financial Initiative (PFI) and it is therefore Monbiots book which is my first recommendation

despite being now 10 years old and concentrating its attention on only part of the picture (the

political-business interface). Part of the critique, of course, of our governance arrangements is how


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the corporate ownership of the media has muzzled the critical journalistic voice Will Hutton is very

eloquent about that in his latest book.

6.5 And politiciansSome politicians, of course, do produce books which advance our understanding of the whole process.

I speak not of Tony Blair and that whole self-justifying political autobiographical genre - but the

writings of people such as RHS Crossman (on whose notes on Bagehot I grew up); John McIntosh

(who was my tutor); Leo Abse (whose Private Member was a marvellous psychological study of

politicians); David Marquand; and, of course, the monumental diaries of Tony Benn . And New

Labour had some honourable people in its ranks who accepted that their critical or maverick

approach denied them office eg Paul Flynn. Chris Mullin has also given us 2 studies of politics and

government in action. But, over 50 years, not a single title which deserves the epithet critical.

Tony Wright is an academic who for more than a decade operated quietly as Chairman of the

prestigious Select Committee on Public Administration and helped produce a raft of critical reports on

various aspects of governance operations. How retired from parliament, he has become a Professor (of

Politics) and I look to him for some of the missing critique. Pity he cant get together with George

Monbiot to produce an expanded and updated version of the GB book!!

6.6 The shadow worldSo far Ive discussed academics, journalists and politicians. But what about the shadowy world of

political advisers, Think Tanks and NGOs? As we might expect from such a concentration of putative

brainpower, three of my 4 recommendations come from this stable. Political Power and democratic

control the democratic audit of the United Kingdom

http://books.google.com/books?id=8lIpqOchGWEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_su

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false was commissioned by the Rowntree Trust and produced in

1999 - by Stuart Weir and David Beetham. Weir followed it up in 2009 with a short spoof constituion

of the UK. These focus very much on the centralisation of power.

http://www.democraticaudit.eu/download/Unspoken_constitution.pdf

My third nominee for useful study of government capacity is ubiquitous (advisor) Chris FostersBritish Government in Crisis(2005)

http://books.google.com/books?id=8BAeXj5NBssC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_su

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=falsewhich extends the analysis to the administrative aspects

which Flynn describes but which (as befits someone who was a senior Price Waterhouse employee)

fails to mention the interstices with the business world.

My final nomination is another product of a british Foundation Rowntree again. Power to the People

(2006) http://www.powerinquiry.org/was the result of an independent inquiry (which in true britisah

tradition invited evidence and organisaed dialogues) and can therefore reasonably be seen as a

mainstream diagnosis and set of prescriptions. I would faulit it only because of its basic assumption

that if the system is made more transparent, representative, decentralised and accountable, everything

will be OK

6.7 The questions remainAfter all this scribbling, then we are left with a central question is the British problem one of

centralisation and overreach? A failure of the political class? Civil service incompetence? Corporate

takeover? Or, as Stoker argues, misunderstanding? At one or time or another in the past 5 decades

each has been proposed as the key problem. Little wonder that I am sympathetic to systems

approaches or to constraints on initiatives!

So far, so parochial! A key question I would like some help on is the extent to which this concern

is a British/Anglo-saxon phenomenon or a wider European issue.

Perry Andersons The New Old World(2009) is one of the few books which give us intellectual andpolitical insights into our neighbours.


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7. Floating in words, metaphors and languageIn 1979 some British citizens became so incensed with the incomprehensible language of official

documents, letters and forms that they set up a campaign called The Plain English Campaign. It was

its activities in making annual awards for good and bad practice that shamed most organisations

public and private - into reshaping their external communications. Their websitewww.plainenglish.co.ukcontains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and

lists of all the organisations which have received their awards.

But they have seem to have worked in vain since, in 2007, the Local Government Association felt it

necessary to recommend that 100 words be banned (not the same thing as book burning!!)

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=7701430, And two years later it had expanded the

list to 200 words - thttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7949077.stm. Some of the words have me baffled (I

have not lived in the UK for 20 years!) but I find this is a quite excellent initiative. I have a feeling that

it may not in the aftermath of a General election and massive public cuts have been taken seriously

enough. The offensive words included -

Advocate, Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon,Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, Can do culture, Capabilities, Capacity,Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome, Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment,Client, Cohesive communities, Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Communityengagement, Compact, Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments,Core Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting, Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue, Double devolution,Downstream, Early Win, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement, Engaging users, Enhance,Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate, Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms,Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality, Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Goodpractice, Governance, Guidelines, Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvementlevers, Incentivising, Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates (a bitunfair!), Interdepartmental surely not?), Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint working, level playingfield, Lever (unfair on Kurt Lewin!), Leverage, Localities, Lowlights (??), Mainstreaming, Managementcapacity, Meaningful consultation (as distinct from meaningless?), Meaningful dialogue (ditto?),Mechanisms, menu of Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities (why?), Networkmodel, Normalising, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter,Participatory, Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network,Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace, Potentialities, Practitioners(whats wrong with that?), Preventative services, Prioritization, Priority, Proactive (damn!), Processdriven, Procure, Procurement, Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol,Quick win (damn again), Rationalisation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back, Scoping,Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement (why not?), service users, Shared priority, Signpost, Socialcontracts ,Social exclusion, spatial, Stakeholder, Step change, Strategic (come off it!), Strategicpriorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional, Subsidiarity (hallelujah); Sustainable (right on!), sustainablecommunities, Symposium, Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic,Thinking outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down (?), Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional,Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision, Visionary,And what about coach, mentor, drivers, human resource management, social capital, tsar ???? Anyway

a brilliant initiative (if you will forgive the term)

And in 2009 a UK Parliamentary Committee actually invited people to submit examples of confusing

language which they then reported about in a report entitledBad Language!

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmpubadm/17/17.pdf

I suppose if post-modernists have done anything, they have made us more aware of language. After

all, they spend their time deconstructing texts! And they have been active in the field of publicadministration Postmodern Public Administration(2007) is one taken at random -


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http://books.google.com/books?id=yDyMc0ic4VIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_su

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=falseThe trouble is that they play so many word games amongst

themselves that what they produce is generally incomprehensible to the outsider. Despite their

critiques and claims, therefore, I do not consider them helpful companions.

Before the post-modernists came along, M Edelmans bookThe Symbolic Use of Politics was

published in 1964 but then ignored not least by myself.

http://books.google.com/books?id=h163WQZ_Ma8C&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_s

ummary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

I have never found Chomsky an easy companion but clearly books like hisLanguage andpolitics(1988) are highly relevant to this theme - http://books.google.com/books?id=1lCwP-

RNExkC&printsec=frontcover&hl=ro&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

One of the most insightful texts for me, however, is Gareth MorgansImages of Organisation- a

fascinating treatment of the writing about organisations which demonstrates that many of our ideas

about them are metaphorical : he suggests the literature uses eight "images" viz organisations as

"political systems", as "instruments of domination", as "cultures", as "machines", as "organisms", as"brains", as "psychic prisons", as "flux and transformation" and as "instruments of domination".

8. The role of international agencies in creating La Pensee

UniqueThe World Bank is not allowed to engage in political activity and promulgated various words

(governance; social capital) to conceal the fact that they were engaged on a highly ideological mission to

privatise the world and to hollow-out government. The OECD has perhaps been an even more

effective proselytiser through the way it brings practitioners together with researchers and

issues publications selling NPM.

9. The importance of satireSatire has lone been a powerful weapon against the pretensions of power Voltaires Candideand

Swifts Gullivers Travelsare well-known literary examples. Ralph Steadman and Gerard Scarfe are

modern caricaturists in the tradition of Hogarth; and the Liverpool poets (McGough) sustained the

protestors of the 1960s. British people are not so familiar with the Bert Brechts City poems or the

savage anti-bourgeois paintings of Georg Grosz in the 1920s and 1930s.

A more recent powerful satirical essay Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped! was penned by the

author of the Yes MinisterTV series and exposes the emptiness behind the rhetoric about democracyand government. It is available only on my website at -

http://www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform/key%20papers/Democracy%20_Yes%20Minister_.pdf

In 1987 Management Professor Rosabeth Kanter produced Ten Rules for Stifling Initiative

http://nomadron.blogspot.com/2009/10/ten-rules-for-stifling-innovation.htmlwhich I have often used to

great effect in Central Asian training sessions.

1999 saw the appearance of The Lugano Report; on preserving capitalism in the twenty-first Century

which purported to be a leaked report from shady big business but was in fact written by Susan George.

Management guru Russell Ackoffs great collection of tongue-in-cheek laws of management

Management F-Laws how organisations really work( 2007)

http://books.google.com/books?id=FCr2H97V4YwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

As the blurb put it They're truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simpleand more reliable guides to managers' everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by


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scientists, economists and philosophers. An added bonus is that British author, Sally Bibb, was asked

to respond in the light of current organizational thinking. Hers is a voice from another generation,

another gender and another continent. On every lefthand page is printed Ackoff and Addison'sf-Law

with their commentary. Opposite, you'll find Sally Bibb's reply. A short version (13 Sins of

management) can be read here http://www.f-laws.com/pdf/A_Little_Book_of_F-LawsE.pdf. A typical

rule is The more important the problem a manager asks consultants for help on, the less useful and

more costly their solutions are likely to be.

Robert Greenes 48 Laws of Powermay not be satire but it is a very salutary counter to the thousands

of unctuous managment texts which attribute benign motives to senior management.

A spoof on the British Constitution produced recently by Stuart Weir is another good example of the

power of satire - http://www.democraticaudit.eu/download/Unspoken_constitution.pdf

10. The way forwardAs Ive worked on these words and been reminded of various key texts which have, over the

centuries, tried to puncture the pretensions and deceits of the powerful and the guardians ofknowledge which sustained them I have realised how rare this endeavour has been. Only the

specialised cognoscenti have the knowledge and authority to undertake the effort and they have too

much to lose! Of course the discipline of economics, for example, is now subjected to a lot of criticism

and adjustment (at least on its edges) - and post-modernists have cleverly dissected bodies of

knowledge but hardly in a reader-friendly language!

But we are overdue a text which will give the average interested citizen the incentive to understand

just how weak are the intellectual justifications for so much of the behaviour of modern elites and

satire and ridicule will probably be important elements in such an expose.

In 1996 Harold Perkins gave us a highly critical account of The Third Revolution - Professional Elites

in the Modern World but, despite the occasional passion, its tone remains too academic for the purpose.

Daniel DorlingsInjustice why social inequality persistsgives us not only a lot of useful material but,

even more importantly, the suggestion that 5 belief sets sustain contemporary inequality that elitism is

efficient; greed is good; exclusion is necessary; prejudice is natural; and despair inevitable.

But where is the literary satire?

11. Further ReadingIn addition to the texts quoted in the introduction above, I would add the following as useful

companions in the search for understanding -

The Art of the State culture, rhetoric and public management; Chris Hood (2000)The Future of Governing - four emerging models; B Guy Peters (1999)

Market-driven politics neo-liberal democracy and the public interest; Colin Leys (2003)

How Mumbo-jumbo conquered the world; Francis Wheen (2004)

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/sokala/wheenf.htm

Books like Great Planning Disasters(Peter Hall 1982) and Seeing Like a State - how certain schemes

to improve the human condition have failed(James Scott 1998) showed us how bad centralised

decision-making could be and Tony Travers (Failure in British Government; the politics of the poll

tax 1994).

Christian Wolmar (The Great Railway Disaster 1996) and Allyson Pollock (NHS plc) showed us how

wasteful the private end of the spectrum was. For the effect on transition countries asee

http://beyondthetransition.blogspot.com/2011/01/polish-railways-failure-of-deregulation.html

Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of hope reliving The Pedagogy of the Oppressed 1994); Robert Chambers

(Whose Reality Counts? putting the first last1997); and Tony Gibson (The Power in our Hands


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1996) are all important inspirations for those who believe in putting the ordinary citizen in the driving

seat. Mintzbergs The management of government(2000) is one of the most thoughtful contributions

to the question of how we should organise government.http://www.bdp.org.ar/facultad/catedras/cp/tecadm/Mintzberg%20gerenciando.pdf

12. No CommentHistorians like Arthur Schlesinger and theorists like Albert Hirschman have recorded that every thirty

years or so, society shifts - essentially, from the public to the private and back again. The grass, after

a while, always feels greener on the other side. The late 1940s to the late 1970s was a period of the

public, the late 70s to now, the private. Now the conditions are right for another turn, to a new

common life and the security and freedom it affords, but only if we make it happen by tackling a

market that is too free and a state that is too remote

Compass Think Tank 2011

Decade Themes of intellectual

discussion

Key names

1930s The managerial revolutionEnd of capitalism

J Burnham

J Strachey

1940s KeynesismMeritocracy

New world order

JM Keynes

1950s End of ideologyRevisionism

Private affluence/public squalour

D. BellA. Shonfield; Tony Crosland

JK Galbraith

1960s Worship of scaleModernisation of society

Participation

critique of professionals

Peter Berger

Pateman;

Ivan Illich

1970s Costs of economic growthCollapse of welfare stateSmall is beautiful

Change

corporatism

EJ MishanBuchananE. Schumacher; L. Kohr

S. Beer; A. Toffler; D. Schon

Cawson

1980s DeindustrialisationPrivatisation

Pursuit of excellence

ecology

decentralisation

globalisation

Blackaby; Dyson

Consultancies; World Bank

Tom Peters

James Lovelock

OECD

Stiglitz, Martin Wolf

1990s End of historyFlexibility and reengineering

Reinvention of government; NPMClimate change

The learning organisation

Washington consensus

Fukayama

OECDScientific community

Senge

World Bank

2000s Good governanceNeo-liberalism and its limits

Environmental collapse

Migration

Social integration

World bank; OECD

Naomi Klein

Scientific community

?

?

2010s MigrationThe financial system

Breakdown of society

Injustice

everyoneStiglitz

Dorling


23/23

Documents

Just Words - a Sceptic's Guide to jargon